Chapter Twenty-Three
Mirror, Mirror
Kaleb
Addi winds herself around me, her body sinuous and sweet as she glides against me, skin to skin, finally in my bed. I moan into her mouth, twirling my tongue with hers in a sensual dance. Her honeysuckle and vanilla taste twines with a spritz of lime from that first night in the club, a memory that lingers over us.
Warm, soft, all the things I love about her … she’s right there beneath me where she belongs. I pump my hips in time with hers, enjoying the simple pleasure of making love to the woman I adore.
“Aw. That’s cute. Did you learn to do that in grade school?” Mana’s caustic brand of sarcasm breaks into my peace.
“What?” I rouse out of the vision of her where I swear she’s still beneath me, my cock encased in her liquid, warm heat, and spit out a mouthful of dank feathers from the old pillow on the mattress we used last night. “What the fuck…?” I freeze, looking down and find myself humping a puddle of Mana’s leftover slop. “Jesus Christ.” I swipe a hand over my cock, knowing this shit will never come off. Likely it’ll stain my soul. “What the fuck is wrong with this place?”
Mana and Bowen burst into hysterics at my side, the shitty, deranged-as-fuck angel rolling around on the floor beside the bed. “Oh, human. That was funny. Do it again,” he begs, sitting up like a puppy.
I lash a foot out at him that he catches instead of dodging, and he licks one of my toes while I try to wriggle free, then sucks one. My cock, still covered in Mana’s cold cum that reacts to the angel’s fuckery and death grip, rises with a heady dose of unwanted arousal.
“Stop that. Fuck,” I gasp.
My mouth hangs wide, recalling the last time the angel performed his dark magic on my body, though I’ve not had the destructive pleasure of his touch firsthand, until the last twenty-four hours. I yank at my leg while Mana watches, smirking and doing nothing, the fucktard, but Bowen refuses to release me, sucking and licking.
The image of him exactly where he is on his knees licking our balls while we fucked Addi senseless in a frenzy the night before is too much. I blow all over the angel’s face, adding to his filth, and he licks my cum from his lips.
“Thank you.” He bats his eyelashes at me.
I flop back onto the bed, shoving my pants back up and tucking my spent cock away. “The fuck is wrong with all of us?”
“So much,” Mana muses. His face darkens. “It seems our rogue angel has done his little trick again.”
I frown. “Done what?” I reach for Addi and find the bed empty. The vision of her was exactly that. “The fuck has he done?” I growl.
Bowen simpers at the floor. “Oh, God,” he groans, running his hands over my ankles in a twisted form of worship. “Make that sound again.”
I shake my head at the oversexed creature and kick him away. “Get off me. Where is she?” I direct that last at Mana.
He looks straight at me. “Sinner’s End. Beyond my reach, hellspawn.”
I snarl. “Looks like we have lots to talk about on the trip across town.”
****
It turns out Mana has a door to Addi’s damn house in his fucking study. Not his bedroom, because why would a demon need to sleep? And he fucks wherever he pleases, clearly.
He gestures me through with one hand, his eyes fathomless, almost sad. “I couldn’t use it until she needed me,” he whispers, and I swear the asshole chokes up.
Unable to give a shit, I walk across the floor of her room, the fragments of her childhood still evident in the traces of pink in her lace curtains, her handmade quilt, the crystal ornaments on her dresser. Her bed is still unmade from the last time she slept here, the scorch mark on the floor.
Mana follows me, his step cautious, but I have no time to waste on his precious moments.
“You said she’s beyond your reach.” I pause at her bedroom door, ready to stretch the hellspawn muscles he keeps telling me I have. “Where exactly does that end?”
His mouth thins into a tight, colorless line. “At the end of the graveyard. Not the entrance beside the house, the rusty little fence of the original land gifted to the first owners of Sinner’s End.”
I nod and take a step across the threshold to her room while he stays exactly where he is. It feels significant, somehow. “Why?”
“Why, what?” Bowen appears at his side stifling a yawn I’m almost certain is fake as fuck.
“Why was the land given to the first owners?” I gesture to the ancient house that creaks around us, adding its husky voice to the conversation.
Mana offers me a slight smile while Bowen stills. “To ensure the covenant stays in place, of course.”
I mimic the fallen angel’s behavior. “What covenant?”
“To protect the juncture at Sinner’s End where the Void meets.” Mana sighs when I stare at him.
“English, please,” I snap.
His lips lift in a silent snarl. “The covenant protects the owners of the house from the pull of the Void. In return they protect the Void from the prying talons of human and other kind who might wander in with intent, harmful, ignorant, or otherwise.”
My chest tightens. “Are the sisters aware of this treaty?”
Mana shrugs. “Their parents were.”
“And if it’s broken?”
He smiles, a wicked thing that tightens my jeans with the sort of need I hate from the remnants of his sated pleasure I still wear by default, and a desperation to find Addi and take her the fuck out of here.
“If it’s broken all bets are off, hellspawn. I’ll claim every part of her and sacrifice her sister in her place as an offering to sate my master’s hunger.”
I stare at him, my mouth dry as my feet start to move.
“Run, run, spawny,” Bowen taunts, his voice echoing through the house, following me into the graveyards beyond the rickety walls of Addi’s accursed home. “Keep running. You won’t find her.”
Like hell I won’t. But I promise you will never taste her when I do.
I leap between graves that date back hundreds of years, before the town proper was built, predating the asylum. My path careens wildly as I dart around an old crypt, its rusty gate swinging wide in a breeze that whips around me in an impotent dust devil, all rustling leaves that tear at my clothes. I bat the grasping tendrils away like they are hands, unsure what creatures Mana sent after me to stay my path, or what awaits Addi in the Void.
A lingering fear that the rift between reality and Mana’s demonic plane reached the house and the asylum fizzles somewhere low in my gut, suffocating me from the inside out. I choke on stale air and the old souls long departed this life that linger in this frozen space with no home to return to as I stumble over the thin, rusted gate Mana mentioned and into the original hallowed lands of Sinner’s End.
Beyond the limits the demon is able to tread. But me, with my human blood, can. Go figure the fuck out of that one. I don’t make the rules, but I sure as hell intend to break every damn one in sight to find our girl.
“Addi,” I call, my voice rough with need and fear. “ Addi. ”
I scan the area, the headstones here white and old, their names and dates worn away by time’s cruel touch. No memory remains of the bones beneath our feet turned to dust.
I near a thick-trunked oak, trailing my fingers around its graffitied bark, the initials carved there. Had I been a few years younger, I might have declared my love for Addi thus, but that was a child’s game. Though I don’t deny it, my need, my craving for her, runs far deeper than a simple date, a quick fuck, and four initials and a heart embedded in the bark of a tree to withstand time’s brutal kiss.
“She won’t see you.” Lethe leans against a cracked headstone, his ashy feet barely touching the moss-carpeted ground. “She’s resting.”
I plant myself and stare the not-angel down. “This isn’t a game, Fallen. You don’t know who you are or what you need to give to be able to play this game.” What the stakes are. Who you might lose.
I understand Mana all too well. I know his games, how he plays. If only one of us walks away today, it must be Addi. That’s what he wants. That’s the offer. I thought I had a better deal with him than this but if it ensures her safety, I’ll do it.
I don’t, for a second, believe there is no loophole that prevents him from setting foot where I stand right now. A law, absolutely, but a loophole? No.
“Get her for me, please,” I say in a low voice, keeping the threat clear and open.
Lethe frowns at me. “You’re not like the others. You … love her.”
“No shit,” I snap. “Look, I’m running on short sleep. I don’t know if you understand this, but he’s playing you. Mana. Bowen. Whoever. They set you up for a joke. This isn’t the best way to start your day, and you’re fucking with mine. Give her back to me and we all go home. Play again tomorrow. Some other fucked-up game. Otherwise, we find out if you’re as immortal as you think you are.”
He smiles. “Or we find out if you will outlive the woman you love.”
I stare at him.
Well, shit.
I swallow and nod. “There’s that.” He paces around in a broad circle and I match him, step for step, plotting the course. It can work, if I keep him distracted for twelve steps and if someone else is paying attention. If I’m not the decoy. “But do you love her as much as you think you do? How much of this isn’t what you expected?”
Step, step, step.
He runs a hand through his hair, ruffling it the wrong way. “I don’t know. I didn’t expect anything.”
Step, step.
I scoff. “Of course you did. How could you think you would get out of this without some form of recompense?” Step. Step. “What, just because Mana can’t walk in, that you would walk out with the goods?”
“Don’t talk about her that way!” Step. “She’s not some product to be traded!”
Step.
I smile, genuine with him for the first time. “No, she’s not.” Step. I nod to the girl herself who appears behind him, shielding her eyes and confused as fuck, wearing the scent of each of us. Claiming each of us. That might be a dangerous thing, or it could save her life. Step. “Hey, Addi.”
“Addi.” Lethe forgets himself, whirling on the spot, and all bets are off. Step. “I didn’t realize you were awake. Are you okay? I didn’t know if you needed—”
“You piece of shit,” Mana hisses in his ear as the angel crosses back into the borrowed territory where Sinner’s End and the graveyard claims the demon can safely enter, pressing his black blade to Lethe’s throat.
He forces the fallen angel to his knees in the dank earth that has seen the dust of a thousand souls or more these hundreds of years. I can feel their presence in the soil, as though they’ve never been released, or as though they’re … close.
“The Void,” I whisper, my lips cracked, dry.
Addi smiles at me, her eyes vacant once again.
“Hello, child of mine,” she says as I stare into a face superimposed over the woman I love, that I only know from photographs but haven’t ever met in person.
“Mother?” I croak.